Dead or Alive Extremism

So who are the feminists who actually wanted Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 banned? Can I have a show of boobs hands?

Ever since Play-Asia attributed Koei Tecmo's decision not to release the game outside of Asia to "SJW nonsense", the usual suspects have been yelling about a "war on free speech". But the agents provocateurs who instigated said war are some sort of reified 'They', a free-floating self-sufficient pronoun-without-antecedent. This is conspiracy-theorist language, guys.

See also: GameFAQs' best game ever poll.

Press the Gamergaters on this, and you get links to online articles in which the writers roll their eyes at the unabashed male-gaze sexism on display. Eye-rolling, as we all know, is a singular indicator of bellicose intent. It's practically firing a missile. Except for how it's, y'know, not.

When not linking to articles, they clarify that they're talking about "the SJWs", a set of which I am an element. Guys, your argument is literally based on telling me what I think and want, a subject on which I have - not to boast - some considerable authority. You might even say I'm the preeminent expert. I'm kinda going to know if you're wrong. Which you are.

I'm going to be clear here: I don't want your titty game banned, and I don't know anybody who does. What I do want is for your titty game to be criticised, and we all know Gamergate hates thin-skinned people who can't take criticism, so you should be right on board with me on this.

There has been a sea-change in negative criticism of video games in maybe the past five years, to which Gamergate seems to have remained oblivious. When Fox News criticised Mass Effect for including sex and allowing kids to "virtual orgasmic rape" their friends, that was ridiculous. Of course it was. They were trying to manufacture outrage over a story-driven entertainment product containing an admittedly somewhat clumsy (but remarkably tame) romance subplot, fabricating elements from whole cloth in order to do so. But Fox News didn't know what Mass Effect was. Even their invited "expert" had little clue. It is one hundred percent understandable that gamers should feel a little defensive about this. I feel defensive about this.

But as much as Gamergate loves to protest otherwise, Anita Sarkeesian et al do know video games. They make their living playing them and writing about them. They are, however, choosing to look at games through a lens of which the average 'gater has little experience, namely feminism. These aren't people who don't know what they're talking about. I promise you, no-one who doesn't know what they're talking about has even heard of Dead or Alive Xtreme.

By all means, get up in arms when an alarmist news outlet makes an uninformed criticism about games, but when someone's criticism is more informed than you are, maybe take a fucking seat. Of course, Gamergate doesn't make a distinction between informed criticism and uninformed criticism, or maybe can't. To them, criticism is hate, and in their flattened landscape, journalist Tauriq Moosa criticising gendered slurs or a lack of people of colour in games he otherwise loves is on exactly the same level as Jack Thompson calling for a blanket ban (or would be, if they didn't bewilderingly consider Thompson "not so bad"). It's a black and white, Us and Them mentality drip-fed through the dual channels of reactionary politics and "the game They [there's that word again!] don't want you to play" marketing.

The First Amendment is a funny old thing. Although it promotes the separation of Church and State, it's against the separation of head and body for criticising the wrong person. Way to be consistent, America! Anyway, my point is that encouraging criticism is literally the reason freedom of speech exists, so it's bizarre to see these self-styled free-speech warriors objecting to criticism so vehemently. To them, criticism is censorship, and freedom of speech is therefore freedom to speak without being criticised. They pervert the idea of free speech to mean its opposite, and then call us Orwellian.

As is their wont, Gamergate has once again conflated feminism with puritanical Mary-Whitehouse-esque moral guardianship, quite literally responding to accusations of sexism with the confused Spïnal Tap refrain, "What's wrong with being sexy?" Little wonder nobody wants to debate them when they're so exhaustingly pathological at missing the point.

Unity, Steam, and the Gaming Revolution

Five days ago, I downloaded Unity. In between working through tutorials and watching didactic videos, I've managed to construct something that generates a random terrain (based on the Diamond-square algorithm) with different textures based on the steepness of the terrain at any given point, drops a third-person player character on top of it, and allows the player to run across the terrain, using the mouse to turn, all while the game has a rudimentary day-night cycle.

That's five days, most of which, to be honest, were spent learning about Unity rather than working with it. Conclusion: Unity is easy.

Jim Sterling made a video about Unity actually being good as well as just easy (which is what prompted me to try it, to be honest), and how it has an unfairly bad reputation. Which is only fair, since the reason it has an unfairly bad reputation is largely because of his videos where he slags off certain terrible so-called games which happen to be made with Unity.

I want to expand a little bit on that idea here. The problem with Unity is exactly the same as the problem with any other democratising force in any creative medium: When 'can' gets too easy, 'should' is ignored.

That's not to say that democratisation is in itself a bad thing. I fully and without reservation believe that it's a good thing for the tools of game development (or, again, any other creative medium) to be placed in the hands of people who might have talent, but limited resources. But there is a price to be paid for it.

I know this is a common theme in my posts, but we've already seen this happen with music. I'm going to come out and say it: anyone who says music was better in the old days is objectively wrong. Even twenty years ago, what you listened to was mostly what record labels told you to like. There were a few little indie rabbit holes you could explore, if you were willing to expend the time and effort, but mostly it was either mainstream or "big indie". Now, it's super-easy to find music you actually want to listen to, because there's far more chance someone out there has the ability and inclination to make it, and because our methods of music distribution have adapted to that. (Caveat: Music was better in the old days if you don't want to have to actually decide what you like.)

Where gaming is at, particularly with Unity, is where music was ten years ago. At that point, it was a lot easier to record and release music than it was twenty years ago, so there was a vibrant explosion of creativity, but distribution hadn't adapted to that. So you had to wade through dozens of awful MySpace bands - who bypassed the 'should' check because the 'can' check was too easy - before you finally found something listenable.

And in all this, Steam has taken a retrograde step. It has democratised access to its store, which in principle sounds laudable, except Steam is a distributor. It's not Steam's job to democratise game development; it's Steam's job to adapt to the democratisation of game development. Steam has become to games what MySpace was to music ten years ago. You can find something that appeals specifically to you, rather than to a target demographic carefully cultivated by marketing, which is great, but only if you're willing to wade through effluent to get there.

What makes this all the more bizarre is that, at one point, Steam was trying to learn the lessons the trials of music distribution had to teach. Recommendations were based on forming last.fm-style associations between games, and the more recently implemented tag system could have brought a lot more power to show users games they are likely to be interested in.

Except... they didn't really do anything with it. And recommendations have been reduced to highlighting games that a lot of people have bought (honestly, tell me something I don't know), that a lot of people have reviewed positively (implying that Steam reviews have any intrinsic value), or that are just plain new (which really isn't an indicator of anything useful). Oh, and pushing DLC for games I already own. Don't recommend me that. It's quite simple: If I like the game, I will buy the DLC. Your recommendation of it is just a waste of space.

Even the curator system is a good idea in theory, but doesn't work well in practice. For one thing, and perhaps I'm using curation wrong, but whatever, I tend to follow curators whose critical style I enjoy; not necessarily curators who have the same tastes as me. And that works both ways, too. Certain curators I dislike for reasons other than their taste in games are enough to put me off a game if they endorse it. I know that's not rational, but it happens.

Now, here's the thing: I don't even necessarily have a problem with Steam selling asset-flipped garbage. If Valve wants to open the floodgates, abandon quality control, and sell all the things, then that's fine. But when such garbage is given greater standing on the supposedly personalised storefront than a game for which Steam already has all the data necessary to be able to guess I might actually want, then that's when Steam isn't doing its job properly.

Like I say, I'm all for democratisation of game development. Even the "death of modding" I hear people talk about in fearful tones is, to my mind, less because of AAA publishers locking their games down, and more because people who would previously have turned to modding now have access to the tools they need to produce their own games. Which I can't really see as a bad thing.

I did say that there is a price to be paid for it, and that price is that it empowers everyone. Yes, including cynical exploiters and talentless hacks, but not limited to them. And that, I think, is a price worth paying.

But democratisation, if it requires anything, requires our distribution channels to seriously up their game. Digital distribution isn't the same as bricks and mortar retail, but one thing from the old ways still applies: the greater the range you have, the more effort you're going to have to make to help customers find what they're looking for.

The Indie Scene is Gaming's Oasis

On 22nd November 1968, The Beatles released their self-titled ninth album, commonly known as The White Album. Music historians can argue to and fro over whether it was The Beatles' most important album, but it was an album that, as its self-referential title implies, sums up what The Beatles were. The album opened with Back in the USSR, betraying The Beatles' rock 'n' roll roots, and pressed lyrical pop melodies like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da against naked experimentalism like Revolution 9.

On 29th August 1994, Oasis released their debut album Definitely Maybe. It was, you know, an okay rock album. Definitely commercially successful. But these Beatles-wannabes were definitely (maybe) missing something.

The problem with Oasis was that, while the Beatles were great because of their willingness to try new things and diverge from expected forms, Oasis' particular brand of alchemy was indeed about distilling The Beatles down to a formula and reduplicating that. In their eagerness to copy The Beatles, Oasis erased the very thing that made The Beatles exciting. Oasis were, to put it bluntly, very deliberately about not trying new things, because they were so in awe of the past.

On a certain level, I can understand the indie gaming scene's fascination with nostalgia. To celebrate older forms of gaming that have been abandoned by major publishers before their time is not entirely unworthy, especially when what major publishers have chosen to focus on instead is, by-and-large, uninspiring.

But I simultaneously can't help but feel there's a certain level of... let's call it Oasisism in the indie sector. We love those old games, so let's reduplicate those. Ok, but if you're nostalgic for a time when game developers were more willing to try new things, what does deliberately not trying new things really accomplish?

Let's talk about why major publishers' games are so uninspiring. They're not bad games. They're not even games I dislike. But they're made to such a calculated formula that for everything I like about them, I know exactly why I like it. And there's a certain predictability in that, which lacks the power to surprise and, yes, inspire. The magic is gone.

What I love about older games is what I call "The X Paradox", after Egosoft's X series of games. I love the X series. It's one of my most-played franchises, and not without reason. I mean, I know there is a reason, but I'm not entirely sure what that reason is. Ask me to talk about the games and all I'll give you is a laundry-list of complaints. And yet, it still ranks among my all-time favourites. In fact, the lack of ease with which I can identify its appeal is, itself, part of its appeal. The X Paradox, then, can be expressed as "I love it because I don't know why I love it."

X3: Terran Conflict is one of the few more recent games to do this to me, but it's a common theme in older games. It is not, however, something that games that trade on nostalgia have managed to recapture. The reduplication process of nostalgia games is, much like Oasis, trying to distill an appeal formula from the work of people who were just trying stuff.

This process is so entrenched in the indie scene that I can understand people trying to push the label of "alt games" to distinguish themselves from indies. Unlike the nostalgia-trade, alt games are about trying new things. In my more idealistic moments, I detest the term "alt games" because everything is an alternative to something, but at other times I kind of accept that that view is more one of how gaming should be than how it is. As trite a summary as it may be, it's important to try new things because that's what makes games exciting.

I didn't hate Oasis. I just found them kind of boring. Mimicry of pioneering is not in itself pioneering. Mimicry of a game that showed us something we'd never seen before is, by definition, not showing us anything new.

And it's not like the game industry has run out of ideas. There is a massive surplus of cool ideas in game development - more than could ever be made into games. It's just that, thanks to not even market forces, but the perception of market forces, those ideas don't get followed through.

And that's a shame.

Monstrous Regiment

It seems that Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will allow the player to choose between a male and female player character for the campaign, to much celebration from those durned SJWs. But I'm a little more cynical about this.

Consider what Call of Duty's single-player campaign is and has always been about. Its message is clear: a good soldier is a tool, not a person. You are expected to subsume your identity beneath your uniform. You are the property of the United States Government, and you will follow orders. The titular duty of the game trumps who you are.

With that in mind, what does it even mean to have a choice of gender? On the one hand, you're being told that you can choose your identity; on the other, that your identity doesn't even fucking matter. The choice is immediately undermined by the theme of the game.

I don't believe that this is a bad move on the part of Treyarch/Activision; simply a confusing one. It harks back to what I wrote before about the difference between normalisation and humanisation of women. Sure, it's good to have the normalising influence of one of the top-selling video game franchises saying "female characters are playable now - get over it", but it is a franchise that depends on the dehumanisation of its protagonists.

The surface statement - "Women can do whatever men can do" - is certainly a positive one. But it's a statement that feels like it glosses over a lot of gender issues. The subtext to the statement is that being a woman doesn't mean anything. Women are interchangeable with men when they're both nothing more than cogs to be slotted into the military machine. Call of Duty is treating women as people in the same way it treats men as people, which is to say not at all.

I don't want to sound too negative about this. Treyarch have realised that there is no reason the player character shouldn't be female, and have accordingly made that an option. More developers should do that. I celebrate it. But when you look at the reason there's no reason, at why a female character can be included, it gets uncomfortable. Call of Duty is including a female player character not because gender matters, but because it doesn't. And my celebration of that is considerably more muted.

Of course, this is all speculation. I'm assuming Black Ops 3 won't deviate from previous entries in the franchise in other ways. Maybe it will humanise its protagonists more. Maybe it will tell a more personal story. But I doubt it.

Representing as Self and Other

Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, suggested a distinction between two different types of playable character in video games: the avatar and the actor. The avatar, in his model, is a character that the player 'inhabits', projecting either their own personality or an invented personality onto the character. Silent protagonists, such as Gordon Freeman or Link, fall into this category. The actor, meanwhile, is a character with personality pre-created by the game's writer, a character of whom the player takes control. Examples include Gard's own Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. Gard also suggested that avatars should be tied to a first-person view, while actors should be tied to a third-person view, though I think the relationship between camera view and type of playable character can be overstated: Link is an avatar with a third-person view, while J.C. Denton is an actor with a first-person view, and both of them work just fine.

I'm also not convinced that the distinction is as binary as Gard first suggested. Is Mass Effect's Commander Shepard an avatar or an actor? The answer is that she's a bit of both. (Or he is, if you're playing it wrong.) The character is customisable, and the choices presented in the game are, as I've argued before, not 'true' choices that the player is expected to decide on, but questions about how the player interprets the character. Shepard has neither the flexibility of an avatar, nor the rigidity of an actor, but lies somewhere in between.

But what I want to delve into today is the parallel between Gard's concept of avatar and actor, and the psychological concept of 'self' and 'other'. Some playable characters are proxies for the player's 'self', acting as the vessel for the player to be transported into the game world. Other playable characters are, well, 'other'. The player relates to the character, but doesn't necessarily identify with them.

Take Mario and Sonic. After 30 years, we still don't really know who Mario is. He is a (white male) human with whatever personality the player invests him with. He is the 'self'. Sonic, on the other hand, has a personality (unfortunately). But even before he had a personality, in his heyday, he was still a blue hedgehog. Assuming that nobody playing the game is actually a blue hedgehog, he is the 'other'.

This all has a knock-on effect for diverse representation in games. We are comfortable with playing white dudes as the 'self', and we are comfortable with playing all manner of outlandish creatures as the 'other'. The joke has often been made that the industry is content to let you play as a dragon, but balks at letting you play as a woman. When we introduce a character who is a woman, a person of colour, gay, trans, gamedom gets confused. Is this supposed to be a 'self' or an 'other'? It shouldn't be that way: after all, we're content to cast white guys as the 'other' as well as the 'self' - we're content to play as white guys who have their own personalities rather than being a surrogate for ourselves. That's a function of white male defaultism.

Anita Sarkeesian made a video about why the Scythian from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a positive female character. And Sarkeesian's right: the Scythian is a positive female character. But she's a positive female character in a very specific way. It may be an oversimplification, but I would say the two goals of feminism are to normalise women (which is to say, get away from thinking of male as the 'default' and female as the 'exception'), and to humanise women (which is to say, getting people to treat women as actual human beings). These goals are very closely aligned (to the point where I have had trouble explaining the distinction), but I think they are served in games quite differently. Normalising women is better served by allowing a female character to be the 'self' - as the Scythian is. Humanising women is better served by portraying a woman as an 'other' - after all, how do you demonstrate the humanity of someone who has no personality beyond what the player brings with them?

Neither of these things is 'better' or 'worse' (although casting a woman as 'other' does need to take care not to undermine the normalising effect of casting a woman as 'self' in other games). Both are necessary. But I can't help but wonder if it's possible to achieve both at once. On one hand, Mass Effect seems to manage it. On the other hand, ludonarrative dissonance is often caused by a playable character switching unpredictably between 'self' and 'other', as in Grand Theft Auto, where the cutscenes and missions present the character as an 'other', but the between-mission gameplay presents the character as a 'self'.

I've focused a bit on women here, but the same can be said for other non-'default' groups. We need positive examples we can identify with ('self') to normalise them, and positive examples we can relate to ('other') to humanise them.

There is a caveat that, as a white guy, I might be talking nonsense. But I do think that discussions of more diverse representation in games do necessarily need to talk about what particular kind of representation we're talking about, and what that means.

Bias and Objectivity

There's been a lot of talk about the objective review of games, as Gamergate (yes, we're still talking about them. God, I wish we weren't.) have decided to paint having opinions as an example of journalistic bias. Now, before we go any further, let's talk about bias. Bias is where you claim to hold a certain position and have something to gain from making people think you hold that position. When oil companies claim that climate change isn't a thing, that's bias, because they have something to gain from making sure that people continue to consume what they're selling.

Simply having an opinion and expressing it is not bias. Yes, even if it is an opinion you personally do not share. It is ok to like or dislike a thing, and even valuable to tell other people that you like or dislike it, in order to either recommend it or warn people away. And yes, as a reader of reviews, you might dislike something someone else likes, or like something that someone else dislikes, and that review might not be 'correct' for you. But the alternative is to buy the game anyway and then decide whether or not you like it, which hardly puts you in a better consumer position than having read someone else's opinions. What this self-styled consumer revolt is actually doing is advocating a situation where the consumer takes on more, not less, risk of going out of pocket on something shitty. But hopefully we're past the point now where I need to explain to anyone that Gamergate's pro-consumer stance is nothing more than a smokescreen for misogyny. I think most sensible people get that.

But bias isn't really the subject today. I don't even really want to talk about the impossibility of objective reviews, as other people have done that beautifully. I just want to pick up on one point where something can seem to be objective, but actually isn't.

TotalBiscuit, before he decided to put his considerable YouTube celebrity behind a misogynistic hate group and spout transphobic gibberish, made a video where he said that someone's opinion on a game is mostly subjective (and how that's reconciled with his supporting Gamergate is anyone's guess). But he did say that we can be objective about certain things, like optimisation. If a game is poorly optimised, he says, it's poorly optimised and that's that. Anyone who knows half a fraction of a thing about software development knows that this simply isn't true.

When you optimise a piece of software, three things happen. Firstly, the program runs faster. That's the point. Secondly, it becomes harder to make changes in the code. Thirdly, it becomes harder to extend the code. The more you optimise, the more costly and difficult it becomes to patch bugs. The more you optimise, the less extensibility you give to your program.

Would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster? Undoubtedly, but that's not the question. The question is, would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster at the cost of the bugfixes it received post-launch and the power of its modding interface? Whether that cost would have been worth it is a judgement call that depends on which factor you think is the more important. And the relative importance of those factors can only ever be subjective. You can disagree with the decision Bethesda made on this relative importance, but you cannot say it was objectively wrong.

Gaming is both one of the most hardware-intensive and one of the most performance-critical applications of computers. All games do need to be optimised to some extent. But precisely what extent that is depends on a whole load of other factors, many of which are subjective. The idea that more optimisation is always better is sophomoric and naive, and has no place in real-world software development.

The larger point here is that things in games are rarely simply "done well". They're very often done well at the expense of some other factor. Even with the inconceivably large budgets the top-end AAA games have, spending money on one thing means not spending money on another. Part of the art of game development is striking the right balance, but critics and consumers alike have differing views on what "the right balance" is, because they have different subjective priorities.

Being a Boy's Like Sucking on a Lemon

Yesterday, Lionhead Studios tweeted a silly image in honour (if that's the right word) of National Cleavage Day. The image was of a barmaid with an ample bosom holding up two jugs (get it?) of ale. Many quite rightly felt that this image, in the social context of the current climate of video games, was tone-deaf and stupid.

Of course, Gamergate disagreed, because of course they did. Lionhead removed the tweet, which of course caused Gamergate to explode about how SJWs were censoring artistic freedom. Which is missing the point, because we SJWs didn't even want them to remove it - that was all Lionhead. We wanted to have an open discussion about it (you know, open discussion? That thing Gamergate used to pretend they wanted?), and perhaps would have liked Lionhead to apologise for it. That's very different to censorship, but that's an aside to what I wanted to talk about today.

I had a discussion with someone who was complaining that Lionhead was pandering only to straight dudes. That I took on board, but as a straight dude, it's also not flattering to be reduced to a boob-liker. To be fair, I do like boobs, but out of everything that makes up who I am, for that specifically to be chosen as the thing that would appeal to me felt manipulative and insulting. I wasn't, in making this point, trying to say "but what about the menz?" - I was trying to demonstrate that the tweet was doubly stupid because it excluded a large number of people and wasn't particularly flattering to the people it was including.

On reflection, I was right to feel manipulated. It was, "Here's some boobs. You like that, don't you? That's what you want." It was a condescending pat on the head for conforming to expected masculine norms. Where does that expectation come from? It comes from patriarchy.

I remember hearing about some feminist developers who complained that there are already a lot of games for men because there are a lot of games about shooting and racing and sports. I don't want to cast aspersions on how 'truly' feminist they are, but the idea that that is What Men Want is a deeply patriarchal attitude that they've internalised. At the time, I resented the fact that they thought that games with more substance, nuance and/or complexity were an exclusively female domain.

I still don't like the idea, but now I see it for what it is. It's an example of how the patriarchy harms men. The patriarchy sees male as default, and female as an exception. That idea contains a lot of advantages for men, and it's a large part of where male privilege comes from. But in gaming terms (which is, after all, what this blog is about), as soon as something breaks away from the default (and might thereby be more interesting), it's suddenly Not For Men, because male is default.

In fact, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game with not one, but two male-coded words right there in the title, and, one could argue, a game that is brimming with masculine themes, and yet it "feels" like a game for girls because the masculine themes it covers do not conform to patriarchal expectations of masculine norms, nor do the tone or mechanics remotely resemble the games men are "supposed" to like. (Incidentally, it also happens to be one of my favourite games - go check it out.) Brothers is an exceptional game in two senses of the word: it is both excellent, and an all-too-rare departure from the patriarchal default.

The restrictive expectation to conform to masculine norms, whether that be of behaviour or, as in this case, taste, is certainly an area where patriarchy is harmful to men. And when it's compounded by an industry that seeks to maximise profits by targeting a 'default' audience, at the same time reinforcing masculine norms to keep that 'default' market stable, it's also harmful to gaming.